Canadian Railroads > Sign of the times

A notice at the BC Rail Exeter Station. It was a sign of the times and things to come. End of passenger service, end of intermodal service, end of other aspects of the railway and eventually the end of BC Rail.

Passenger service ended 17 years ago today. The image I posted was taken Feb 16, 2005, no staff left at the station to take the notice sign down after the fact.

Doug

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BCR to CN may be a bigger scandal than SNC Lavalin , that may never be known !

Mike Bannon
St Catharines, ON

algoma11 Wrote:
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> BCR to CN may be a bigger scandal than SNC Lavalin
> , that may never be known !

I agree.  After there were irregularities in the bidding process which involved the RCMP raiding the BC Premier's office, and the arrest of two staffers, there was a lengthy court case.

I had a friend who was recently retired from the railway, and he took the time to attend some of the hearings. There were at least 1400 pages of sworn testimony. When it became apparent that no senior BC Government official would be called on to testify, the press and public lost interest. Still, the court hearings continued.

Finally, the judge announced that there was insufficient evidence to prosecute, and the hearings were terminated.

The Premier retired, and others involved were not facing prosecution. However, the results of the proceedings were not publically released and remain not available to the public.

Bidding for Government assets is a simple enough process, whether buying a fire truck or a railway. Purchasers submit a sealed bid, and the highest bidder wins the bid. By the simple rules of commerce, if the process is deemed to be flawed, the auction is cancelled and re-submitted for bids.

In this case, CN is rumoured to have had an unfair advantage in the bidding process which was pointed out by one of the other bidders. The two people who created this unfair advantage were duly tried and convicted.

And then everybody concerned shut up. To me, it always seemed that the "captains of industry" and the BC Courts decided that they didn't want any reputations damaged by releasing the details of the hearings.

Where individuals are named in court documents, in certain instances those files can remain sealed for 50 years or until every individual named is deceased.

Supposedly , Justice is blind. Many think that the sealing of the files in this case is a miscarriage of justice. Even a simple statement by the Supreme Court justice explaining his legal reasons for cancelling the trial would help. 

Also, once the irregularities in the bidding process were discovered, why wasn't the whole process abandoned and done again?

The media has invented a catch phrase for this type of process. "Throwing the staffer under the bus", basically the persons at the top of the process will blame the errors on people lower in the chain of command to avoid responsibility themselves.  Oddly enough, it was the act of blaming staffers that finally bought about the downfall of the man at the top. In an unrelated scandal, other people in the process were aware that they would be sacrificed before people at the top. Somehow, irrefutable evidence was leaked to the press. In this case, and an internal investigation was launched. Rather than face an internal audit, the man at the top resigned. Again, few details have been released.

As to SNC Lavalin. This company was often the succesful bidder on major Government contracts, both provincially in Quebec and Federally. For which they were truly grateful by contributing to political campaigns. In exchange for their generosity, they expected favoured status when bidding on Government contracts. The "Laurentian Elite" , being the ruling class in Quebec is a relatively small group of people including French speaking business leaders and the established political party leaders and the judiciary  that all went to the same university and usually are members of the same faith community and clubs.. Somehow the company was found liable in the bidding process and asked for political favours which the Federal Government may have granted.  At least, the bidding process was questioned in this case. 



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 10/31/19 09:48 by eminence_grise.

Doesn't seem to matter  what ever country  you live politics is still crooked as hell.

eminence_grise Wrote:
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> algoma11 Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> -----
> > BCR to CN may be a bigger scandal than SNC
> Lavalin
> > , that may never be known !

> In this case, CN is rumoured to have had an unfair
> advantage in the bidding process which was pointed
> out by one of the other bidders. The two people
> who created this unfair advantage were duly tried
> and convicted.

Your statement implies that the two government aides who were convicted of breach of trust (and accepting bribes) by leaking information were leaking to CN.

In fact, they were leaking to the Victoria lobbying firm, Pilothouse Public Affairs, that was acting on behalf of OmniTrax, and the leaked information was used in reports by the lobbyist to its client, OmniTrax. The leaked info included the opening bids of the three finalists -- CN, CP and OmniTrax.

The Crown's star witness in the case against the two aides was one of the principals of Pilothouse, who agreed to testify against them in return for immunity against charges of having bribed the aides.
 



Edited 5 time(s). Last edit at 11/01/19 03:14 by railsmith.